Fitting a shape or template to a given image has been studied many years in computer vision. The goal of face alignment is to match a two-dimensional face shape or appearance with a facial image. Applications of face alignment range from face recognition, face tracking, facial expression analysis, three-dimensional face modeling, to face cartoon animation.
Today, with the explosively increasing number of face photographs on the web and the desktop, new applications such as face search and annotation have raised new requirements for face alignment applications, including being fully automatic, efficient, and robust to facial images in under-controlled conditions. Any improvements in face-alignment applications are desirable.